The Data Management Task Force (DTMF) developed the Common Information Model (CIM) in 1996 to provide a common way to share management information enterprise wide. The CIM schema provides models for various implementations to describe management data in a standard format. A number of graphic user interface (GUI) applications have been developed and deployed which take advantage of the CIM architecture.
According to a presentation by Winston Bumpus of the DTMF presented at the DTMF Comdex Management Presentation, Apr. 3, 2001, entitled, “Network Management and Administration”, best of breed applications are used to manage network and system infrastructure. Different applications gather different pieces of data about the same resource. It is difficult to aggregate data from disparate management applications for: service level measurement; true “end-to-end” view of a network; fault diagnosis; capacity planning; and resource usage billing. It is currently a very manual process (human intensive), inaccurate, slow and cumbersome. Thus a number of products have been developed, and are currently evolving to solve these problems. The multi-computer/serviceguard (hereinafter “MC/ServiceGuard”) product, a product that is managed through ServiceGuard Manager and available from Hewlett-Packard Company, is a specialized facility for protecting mission-critical applications from a wide variety of hardware and software failures. With this system, multiple (up to 16-nodes) systems are organized into an enterprise cluster that delivers highly available application services to local area network (LAN) attached clients. ServiceGuard Manager is the management graphical user interface that can be used to monitor the health of each node and quickly respond to failures in a way that minimizes or eliminates application downtime. Status and information gathered about the network is presented to the user (network administrator) via a GUI.
The look and feel of a graphical user interface (GUI) is very subjective. User feedback is therefore essential for a GUI to be successful. It is advantageous to have a method for changing display appearance based on client/user feedback. Data indicating status and properties of objects monitored by the GUI process are strongly interrelated and can be presented in a variety of different ways. Further, addition/deletion of object types or relationship among the objects results in necessary modifications of the GUI layout in order to present the data to the user in a logical manner.
Graphical status displays used in the prior art GUIs to display status or properties of objects are encapsulated in source code. Thus, to change the GUI layout, or add/delete tabs or tables in a window, the developer is required to modify the source code and recompile the application code. This makes modification of the GUI layout slow and cumbersome because of the recoding and recompilation necessary. Moreover, each time source code is modified and recompiled, the risk of introducing new bugs (errors) into the GUI is increased.